‘Dear! How Tiresome it must be to be so religious! [...] and where’s the use of it?’ Religious Identity and the Empowerment of Femininity in Mary Martha Sherwood’s The Fairchild Family (1818) and The Rose: A Fairy Tale (1821)

[...]the misogynistic perception of women as mental, physical and spiritual weaklings was a useful tool for propping up the idea of male superiority and published tracts were essential in disseminating such views. [...]as Jacqueline M. Labbe has argued, this could possibly be seen not as a metaphor for the restriction of women (as is most common) but as a “cleansing” metaphor which helps to transform them “from whore to angel” and which, she suggests, was the precursor of the Victorian adulation of the angel in the house and the redemptive image of the mother as Madonna (para. 8). Since didactic literature was a popular medium for educating and enlightening the next generation, it became a useful genre for promoting a more empowered kind of femininity, the kind that is based on religious teaching rather than sexual stereotype. [ 6 ] Didacticism, of course, was not confined just to children’s books; according to Avery, “it was the spirit of the period, the official creed of authors, critics and public” (Nineteenth Century Children 13).